Producing Productive and Powerful Ideas
This academic essay explores the importance of encouraging students to developing new and important ideas that have the power to enact change.
By drawing on relevant research in the field of composition, I propose the most important ways to unleash students’ creative expression.
Ideas give birth to more ideas, generate knowledge, and have the power to enact change. Ideas are the fabric of any powerful tapestry – any argument or proposal that suggests a new world – without ideas, we have nothing. Through the act of writing, our ideas take form and are given life, often without writing, our ideas will never materialize. As Robin Williams once famously articulated, "No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world." For students in the first-year composition classroom to create meaningful writing, they must begin with the notion that their ideas are capable of doing something, their words are capable of changing something, and their voices have the power to perform in the world around them. In pedagogical practice, encouraging students to access their creativity and believe in the benefits of writing, propels them to write with authority and create meaning with their words. Most students coming into first-year composition have been programmed by High School writing, which often develops students into robotic copiers of what they read and teaches a systematic approach to writing ("you write this way, or you are doing it wrong."). Therefore, it is our responsibility to ask our collegiate students to approach the act of writing with a new perspective: write with individuality, write with creativity, and write as if their ideas matter – because they do.
After asking my students in English 102 to craft analysis essays, I discovered how many of my students struggle with the ideas of writing and brainstorming new ideas. That is, some of my students explained that their entire lives, their writing has been primarily in the form of summary – reading a book or article and writing a summary about the writers' intentions with the text – and some of them had never heard of analytical writing. To address this issue, I hosted several analytical activities during class in which the students' brainstormed ideas in groups after engaging with a text. Through this process, I noticed that the students' most informed and thorough responses surfaced if they were engaging with a material of interest to them. The students vocalized the same idea in their written reflections by stating how they appreciated the freedom they had to explore a topic of interest to them in their analysis essays. Once they had completed their rough drafts, I asked students to articulate how they felt about their essays so far. Some students remarked:
Student One: "I'm feeling pretty good about my first essay. Considering it's a topic that I enjoy, I am able to write with ease."
Student Two: "I'm feeling good about my first essay, the topic and the themes of this text are things I am really passionate about so that makes the writing of this essay an easier process for me."
Student Three: "I am feeling very good about my essay and it's been easy to write since this topic is something I like."
Student Four: "I do feel a little bit more confident on this essay then ones I have turned in last semester. I really enjoyed how I was able to write my own topic for this essay because it always comes a little easier this way."